Wednesday, July 31, 2013

At The Barnes & Noble Book Blog, Lauren Passell tagged ten must-read books that take place in the Midwest, including:

The Devil All The Time, by Donald Ray Pollock

The Midwest might not have a reputation for churning out literature kicks to the stomach, like the South does, but this gritty book stands with the best Gothic tales. The Devil All The Time illustrates the (lesser-known) lawlessness of mid-century Ohio and West Virginia with grotesque and unforgettably bizarre characters (an orphan with a commitment to violently Old Testament-like justice; murderous, vacationing hitchhikers; and a preacher on the lam) who kick the wholesomeness right out of the Midwest with grit and fearlessness.

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Laura Frost, an associate professor of literary studies and chair of liberal studies at The New School, is the author of the new book, The Problem with Pleasure: Modernism and Its Discontents.

For Publishers Weekly she named the ten best modernist books (in English)--and offered a few tips for reading them:

1. Take your time: you’re not just reading for plot here; you’re reading for the play of the words on the page, the structure, the overall effect. 2. Be curious: if something is daunting or disorienting, ask yourself what makes it so. 3. Play the game: each book has different principles. The more you figure them out, the more you’ll enjoy reading. 4. Don’t get bogged down: when you come across something like the notoriously difficult “Oxen of the Sun” episode of Ulysses, do your best but keep going until something clicks for you. 5. Finally, re-read. Joyce once claimed, “The demand that I make of my reader is that he [sic] should devote his whole life to reading my works.” That kind of commitment is not required, but it helps.

One title on Frost's list:

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (1930) - Southern Gothic at its most terrible and comic. Fifteen different characters think about a matriarch on her deathbed. Faulkner doesn’t throw any Thomas Aquinas or Sanskrit at you, à la Joyce or Eliot, but the shifting points of view can be just as disorienting. Focus on each character’s eccentricities and how the various voices are arranged. “My mother is a fish”: Discuss.

J. Courtney Sullivan is the author of the novels Commencement, Maine, and the recently released The Engagements.

One of her six favorite books about marriage, as told to The Week magazine:

A Good Hard Look by Ann Napolitano

Author Flannery O'Connor is the star of this novel, a fictionalization of the great Georgia novelist's final years. But the book begins with an unforgettable pre-wedding night, in which peacocks howl into the wee hours and the bride, one of O'Connor's neighbors, ends up with a black eye. The marriage that follows is just as surprising and complicated.

You’ve probably read Jane Eyre, the famous coming-of-age story featuring one of the strongest female characters in literature—and the infamous woman in the attic, Bertha Mason, who has been interpreted as representing everything from the confining nature of Victorian marriage, to the British Empire’s exploitation of its colonial subjects, to Jane herself. Wide Sargasso Sea, written as a prequel to Brontë’s tale, imagines the story from Bertha’s point of view.

"It's 2013 and there are no bases on Mars or even Luna. We aren't exploring the galaxy at warp speed and, given the impossibility of faster-than-light travel, we never will be," notes Damien Walter in the Guardian. Yet, he adds, science fiction is "the only reliable guide I've found to the weird present we're now all living in."

One of five SF realms that Walter suggests helps us understand the world today-- psychic powers:

Far be it from me to make any claims to psychic powers, but in the last 24 hours I've plucked thoughts from the minds of hundreds of other humans in 140-character bites and read dozens of news stories published only minutes before they hit my mind. Octavia E Butler's Patternist novels are a speculative vision of psychic powers operating between human minds, and it's remarkable how many parallels to the internet are to be found there and in other SF tales of psychic powers like Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man. We may not have reached the full Vulcan mind-meld just yet, but our smartphone obsession is not a million light years away from it.

Sunday, July 28, 2013

Anthony Bourdain is a world traveler who has had successful careers as a chef, TV host, and author.

He named his ten favorite books for Business Insider. One title on the list:

True Grit by Charles Portis

"The greatest female protagonist I've ever read. Portis is one of the most underrated under appreciated authors of the 20th century. Forget the film versions. Read the book. His book, 'Dog Of The South,' is also brilliant," Bourdain said.

This classic American novel follows a teenage girl as she tries to avenge the murder of her father in the wild west.

At The Barnes & Noble Book Blog, Allegra Frazier tagged five of her favorite fictional gold diggers, including:

Llewellyn Moss (No Country For Old Men, Cormac McCarthy).

While hunting in the south Texas desert, Vietnam vet Llewellyn Moss stumbles across the bloody site of a drug deal gone wrong. Unwisely, he takes the case of money (complete with tracking device) left behind, putting him in the sights of ruthless hit man Anton Chigurh. Even as Chigurh closes in on him, Moss refuses to yield the money to him or anyone, in spite of the fact that refusing to do means his days are numbered.

Saturday, July 27, 2013

Mickey Sumner is the daughter of musician/actor Sting and producer Trudie Styler. She is best-known for playing Francesca in the TV drama The Borgias. Her latest film is Frances Ha.

One of Sumner's six best books, as told to The Daily Express:

NEVER MIND by Edward St Aubyn

I love the Patrick Melrose series, of which this is the first, and I cannot put them down. This is very dark and twisted but funny and incredibly well written. It starts in the south of France before moving on to New York and then to England. It's great.

"If there is one book, or series, that is, I would want everyone to pick up and read it would have to be the Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St. Aubyn," writes the historian Douglas Smith. "Acerbic, witty, unflinchingly honest and simultaneously heartrending and hilarious, St. Aubyn’s books—Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother’s Milk, and At Last, published in the US earlier this year—are without doubt one of the great literary achievements in English of the past decades. St. Aubyn is one of those rare writers who has to be read and then read again and again."

One of ten excellent international thrillers according to the editors of The Barnes & Noble Review and reported at the Christian Science Monitor:

"The Missing File," by D.A. Mishani

Depressive Israeli detective Avraham Avraham searches for a vanished teenage boy who fascinated his suspicious, obsessive neighbor in this provocative novel built on multiple perspectives, all leading up to a satisfying, heartbreaking conclusion.

Friday, July 26, 2013

At The Barnes & Noble Book Blog, Rebecca Jane Stokes tagged eight fictional women who stood by their men, including:

Kathy (Little Children, Tom Perrotta).

In this novel about repressed sexuality and stifled dreams set in a small suburb, married former feminist Sarah begins an affair with hunky, also married Todd. Though Sarah’s husband eventually leaves her, Todd’s gorgeous wife, Kathy, holds on. (Though she cannot get over the fact that he picked Sarah, a woman she deems ugly, for his extramarital activity.)

Thursday, July 25, 2013

One title on the Barnes & Noble Review's list of books on baby-watching in Great Britain, past and present:

Lady Jane Grey: A Tudor Mystery
by Eric Ives

On other occasions, an extended family member is seated upon the throne. When King Edward VI died suddenly in 1553, his cousin Lady Jane Grey assumed the throne as queen of England -- and was unceremoniously beheaded two weeks later in a plot initiated by Edward’s illegitimate half sister, Mary. This revealing look at one of the greatest scandals in Tudor history is an adroit, compelling portrait of Lady Jane -- a woman of poise and great integrity, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Katherine Rundell grew up in Africa and Europe and was elected a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. She begins each day with a cartwheel and believes that reading is almost exactly the same as cartwheeling: It turns the world upside down and leaves you breathless. Rooftoppers, her latest book, was inspired by summers spent working in Paris, where at night, she trespassed on rooftops.

At the Guardian, she named her top ten descriptions of food in fiction. One title on the list:

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Amy's pickled limes are both enticing and puzzling. "If one girl likes another, she gives her a lime," she say. "If she's mad with her, she eats one before her face, and doesn't offer even a suck." A few years ago I found a simple 19th-century recipe for pickled limes: scrubbed limes in a jar of water and seasalt. Possibly I didn't leave them to marinade for long enough. They were not delicious.

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

Gavin Extence was born in 1982 and grew up in the interestingly named village of Swineshead, England. From the ages of 5-11, he enjoyed a brief but illustrious career as a chess player, winning numerous national championships and travelling to Moscow and St Petersburg to pit his wits against the finest young minds in Russia. He won only one game.

In his first novel, The Universe Versus Alex Woods, epileptic teen Alex Woods is a target of bullies ... and at least one object from space. (He became a national celebrity at age 10 when he was hit by a meteorite.) What reader wouldn't pull for the kid?

For Publishers Weekly, Extence named ten of the best underdogs in literature, including:

Captain John Yossarian, Catch-22 – The perennial victim of Catch-22. In order to escape the horrors of World War Two, Yossarian has to request that the army’s psychiatrists discharge him on the grounds of insanity. The only problem is that any such request will be viewed as incontrovertible proof of his sanity, as you’d have to be insane not to make the request. After 500 pages of vicious circles, this is another book with an ending that is simply sublime.

Monday, July 22, 2013

Álvaro Enrigue's story collection Hypothermia explores identity and isolation through the eyes of garbage collectors, professors, and outcasts. It's also loosely based on Dante's Inferno. For Publishers Weekly, Enrigue tagged ten "great literary works which have set out to modify our reading of other, earlier ones," including:

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert - A book that everyone has read –or at least must pretend to have read– and which is based on another one, even more classic: Don Quixote. Few phrases have been quoted more than Flaubert’s: “Madame Bovary, that’s me.” If the author identified perhaps a little closely with his character, it’s also true that the wife of Doctor Bovary is a feminine incarnation of Don Quixote de la Mancha: he lost his mind reading novels of chivalry while she lost hers reading romance novels.

Saturday, July 20, 2013

At The Barnes & Noble Book Blog, Amy Wilkinson tagged five books Kate Middleton should read while waiting to give birth, including:

Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens

Besides the fact that Great Expectations is an awful pun for the media furor surrounding the royal baby’s arrival, the book is rich with themes like good versus evil, the rich versus the poor, and love and rejection—all of which the future leader of England should think about.

Sean Stockdale and Alex Strick are the authors of Max the Champion, (illustrated by Ros Asquith), a picture book about a sports-mad little boy, also featuring dozens of subtle visual references to disability and inclusion.

For the Guardian, they named ten of the best children's books featuring (or even just including) disabled characters, including:

The Terrible Thing that Happened to Barnaby Brocket by John Boyne

This book, from the author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, is our wild card. It's a rather quirky novel about a young boy who is born defying the laws of gravity – much to the mortification of his painfully "normal" parents who, quite frankly, cannot and will not cope with the humiliation of having a child who is different. What we loved here were the messages about society's perceptions of 'normality' and the desire to correct those who don't fit the norm. We also liked the inclusion of various other diverse characters including a same-sex couple.

Friday, July 19, 2013

At io9 Charlie Jane Anders came up with a list of eleven books that every aspiring television writer should read, including:

Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman

Jose Molina (Firefly, Haven, The Vampire Diaries) recommends this as a great book for screenwriters specifically. "The Goldman book is a brutally honest account of the life of a writer in Hollywood. (It focuses mostly on features, but it's a great primer for anyone who wants to know what it's really like. When I was 21 and first starting out, Michael Piller insisted I read it. The whole time I was reading, I was like "it'll be different for me — I won't have to eat any of this shit." I was 100% wrong." This isn't a writing book per se, but it's an essential book "about the Hollywood culture," Molina adds. "How writers are perceived and treated. It's a book you have to read, simply because you need to be warned what you're getting into. It's the first necessary step in losing the naivete with which so many people approach the industry."

Thursday, July 18, 2013

Daisy Hildyard was born in Yorkshire in 1984 and currently lives in London, where she is studying for a PhD on scientific language. Hunters in the Snow is her first novel.

For the Guardian, she named the ten best poems, books, and plays about our human inheritance, including:

On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin

Near the beginning, Darwin considers what we do not know about our ancestors.

"The laws governing inheritance are quite unknown; no one can say why the same peculiarity in different individuals of the same species, and in individuals of different species, is sometimes inherited and sometimes not so; [or] why the child often reverts in certain characters to its grandfather or grandmother or other much more remote ancestor."

At The Barnes & Noble Book Blog she tagged five "specimens of outlandish children’s literature [that] will convince you that you’ve spent the day bar-hopping," including:

Fox In Socks, by Dr. SeussI hear that when people get pulled over for a DUI, the cops ask them to recite the alphabet backward. You know what? Just have them read one page of Fox In Socks. Sweet Lorax! It’s impossible. I know this book is meant to teach children rhyming and phonics, but all it’s doing is teaching them that Mommy sounds like a wino when she has to deal with excessive alliteration.

Tuesday, July 16, 2013

Evie Wyld grew up in Australia and London, where she currently lives. She received an MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, and was featured as one of Granta’s New Voices in May 2008.

One of Wyld's five favorite books about farmers, as told to the Telegraph:

Pearl S Buck’s The Good Earth (1931) shows a life of almost relentless toughness for Wang Lung and O-Lan. Plough the earth in the morning, give birth in the afternoon, sow seeds as night falls, always keeping their eyes turned to the soil.

At The Barnes & Noble Book Blog Melissa Albert tagged five books that inspire great mix tapes, including:

High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby.

Hornby’s hilarious, allusion-heavy writing is at its hyperliterate best in this finally-coming-of-age story of a London record store owner who reexamines the entwined histories of his love lives—both with inevitably disappointed women and, more importantly, with music. Perhaps the best writing out there on the art of the mix tape.

Monday, July 15, 2013

Emily Brady was born and raised in Northern California. A graduate of Columbia University's School of Journalism, she has written for the New York Times, Time, the Village Voice and other publications. She has reported from Latin America, Europe, Asia and New York City and now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

In haunting, lyrical language, Urrea digs deep into a tragedy: In 2001, 26 men attempted to cross illegally from Mexico into the U.S., and only 12 survived. Urrea's book explores what drove those men to walk across a desert in search of a better life, as well as the codependent relationship that binds two neighboring nations.

His July 2013 list of the top ten Upper Peninsula (of Michigan) writings of all-time:

Bamewawagezhikaquay's writing in The Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky--

Robert Dale Parker, in the introduction to the book, calls her "the first known American Indian literary writer, the first known Indian woman writer, by some measures the first known Indian poet"; hopefully people will realize that Native American literature, in many ways, begins in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

Catie Rosemurgy's The Stranger Manual--

Catie Rosemurgy's work is stunning; she writes books slowly. There was an eight-year gap between her first poetry book and her second. And she seems on pace for another eight years until the next, but the payoff is worth it. She whispers her poems to you and the intimate voice is sheer beauty, even when it's ugly.

Austin Hummell's Poppy--

Hummell, like Rosemurgy, just simply understands poetry, like his brain has shifted to think poetically, in ways others of us can't. There's something ineffable in what Rosemurgy and Hummell do line-by-line, but the result is consistently interesting. Also, like Rosemurgy, he seems to write rarely, having a seven-year gap between his first and second book. And now he's going into a decade-long gap since Poppy. Hummell fans are anticipating the next book, myself included.

Catie Rosemurgy's My Favorite Apocalypse--

Rosemurgy herself sees her later collection The Stranger Manual as superior to My Favorite Apocalypse, but Rosemurgy's worst poems are better than many authors' best poems. You can turn to any page in this collection and find a truly unique American voice.

Robert Traver's Laughing Whitefish--

As can be seen from the top four writers on this list, the Upper Peninsula is making significant contributions to poetry. Fiction, though, has been problematic. The voices that seem to get widely accepted the most tend to be outsider representations/misrepresentations of the Upper Peninsula in which the cliches of its geography make the page and the characters never truly feel authentically Yooper. Traver is that rare (and desperately needed) U.P. fiction writer who was born, raised, and lived in the U.P., so his characters feel wonderfully real. I'm from Negaunee and his description of the city in its opening felt so dead-on that I was amazed at the detail, especially in contrast to some of the hollow town descriptions I've seen in other books. (I will add this--it will be a breakthrough for the history of U.P. literature the moment that Michigan Tech, Northern Michigan University, or Lake Superior State actually hires a born and raised Yooper for its creative writing faculty who has a major publisher book deal. That simple act would be powerful for U.P. literature, as we could have a writer dedicated to that area able to survive financially and continue to write about the area and have a broad audience to tell those stories. It will be a very happy day for me the day that happens. Maybe they can try to seduce Tom Bissell or Ander Monson to take a position there.)

Jonathan Johnson's Mastodon, 80% Complete--

Johnson's love of the U.P. shows in his poetry. He lacks pretentiousness, instead replacing that with a wonderful embracing of the beauty and flaws of U.P. life.

Ander Monson's Other Electricities--

Monson is one of the strangest writers ever to come from the area. He's the only writer on this list that I would consider post-modern. The results are mixed. Monson has some writing that makes me feel completely neutral, as if it was written by a scientist instead of a creative writer. On the other hand, Monson can come with a surprise left-hook that can make one of his stories or poems so impressive that you walk away thinking he just might be the best writer ever to come from the region. In fact, Monson is probably the author I would choose as the most possible to end up with a Pulitzer Prize. He's hit-and-miss, but when he hits he's absolutely flawless. Or, perhaps, rather, the flaws are so elegant that you wish you could learn how to control those Leonard-Cohen-esque cracks.

Wendell Mayes' Anatomy of a Murder--

Of course, I'm just trying to be controversial here with the name of the writer. I've never read Anatomy of a Murder. I've seen it. As a kid, I read the first page and it just felt a hundred years from where I was at in my life. I've never picked it up again, but I'll get to it eventually. Laughing Whitefish I read much later in life when I was literarily ready for it, I suppose. The first time I saw the film I thought it was OK. Again, it didn't have the immediate connection of a Quentin Tarantino or Paul Thomas Anderson for me. But the second and third viewings, again, when I was older, made me realize that a lot of that screenplay is genius. Mayes evaporates the U.P. authenticity turning the area into a sort of nameless Hollywood version, which is a major problem, but the writing is so good, especially considering what could be written in the 1950s and actually make it to the screen, that I have to include it in the top ten. (By the way, the screenplay is so good, of course, I'm sure, largely because of Traver.)

I wish this book was 200 pages instead of 250+. There are some clunkers included that lower the quality of the overall experience of the book, but eliminate those roughly 50 pages of weaker writings and the remaining 200 pages are an enjoyable, important read. The writing of Echoe Deibert and Clara Corbett immediately come to mind, two writers whose voice is so unique and true that you feel you want to meet them and talk to them for hours at a bonfire after reading their poems.

Carroll Watson Rankin's Dandelion Cottage--

Rankin is problematic. Some of the language in regards to Native Americans can make you wince, but jump over those issues of 1904 authorship and there is some wonderful humor and a softly inspirational story of dealing with issues of poverty to create a beautiful little life in a cottage. The book is charming and its roots in very early U.P. literature make it a YA must-read.

The Welsh actor Siân Phillips may be best known for her television role as the mother/empress Livia in the classic BBC series I, Claudius, and as the Reverend Mother in the science fiction epic film Dune.

One of her six favorite books, as told to The Daily Express:

WIDE SARGASSO SEA by Jean Rhys

I reread this recently and it's so crafty and crafted. I'm surprised every time by how she goes back and forward in time. And the way you realise that you're half in another book, Jane Eyre, is startling.

Saturday, July 13, 2013

Jeremy Strong is the author of over 80 children's books, including the series The Hundred-Mile-An-Hour Dog and My Brother's Favourite Bottom series. His latest book is My Brother's Famous Bottom Gets Crowned.

One of his ten top funniest fictional families, as told to the Guardian:

Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney

Greg Heffley and his family is well known to millions around the globe and rightly so, but this family will also be familiar because in many ways it is like so many, with constant internal strife, warfare, coming back together, splitting apart again, sibling treachery and so on. There's laughter on every page of Jeff Kinney's monster success.

Friday, July 12, 2013

For forty years Virago has dedicated itself solely to publishing women’s writing. To mark the anniversary, ten female authors chose their favorite books from Virago's backlist.

Hilary Mantel's pick:

Angel by Elizabeth Taylor (1957)

At the end of Victoria’s reign Angel is 15, plain and peevish, the daughter of a provincial shopkeeper, a girl with no prospects. But she has secret assets: devouring ambition and a reckless way with words. When Angel begins to write scandalous novels about high society – of which she is totally ignorant – an adoring public laps them up. Elizabeth Taylor’s tender, funny, exquisitely stylish novel keeps us on Angel’s side, even though we are appalled by her narcissism and shocked into laughter by her self-delusion. She is a monster, but a delicious monster, and the novel poses, for writers, questions that don’t date. That’s why I’m so drawn to the book and have loved it for years; there’s a bit of Angel in every writer, I fear.

Paul Wilson is the award-winning author of seven novels, including Mouse and the Cossacks. He works for part of the week as the Business Writer for Pluss, the UK`s largest Social Firm and a leading provider of disability employment services, for whom he writes a regular blog. In 2010 he was elected Vice Chairman of BASE, the British Association for Supported Employment.

One of Wilson's top ten books about disability, as told to the Guardian:

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

There's an ongoing debate in disability politics over to what extent disability should be seen as a deficit or as a difference. Melville's classic sticks rigidly to the former view, but creates a memorable tale of would-be revenge sought by the one-legged Captain Ahab against his nemesis, the whale.

Thursday, July 11, 2013

Jonathan Grimwood, writing under the name Jon Courtenay Grimwood, has won the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novel twice, and his work has been published in over fifteen languages. His new book is The Last Banquet.

For the Guardian, he chose fiction's best treatments of the mother of modern revolts, the French Revolution. One title on the list:

Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

Morality tale, shocking exposé of aristocratic corruption or tragic love story? De Laclos' scandalous 1782 novel featuring Vicomte de Valmont, the Marquise de Merteuil and perversity at war with innocence exposed to an avid French public the squalor and malice of court life (and may or may not have helped bring the revolution closer). In 1985 Christopher Hampton reworked it as play and it's been the basis for several films.